


Like we're supposed to be

by Blake



Category: Lana Del Rey (Musician), Marina & the Diamonds
Genre: Alternate Universe - Non-Famous, Body Image, F/F, Los Angeles, Marina del Rey, Mental Health Issues, Nature Magic, Past Abuse, References to Depression, a very lesbian tale, body image issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-10
Updated: 2019-10-10
Packaged: 2020-11-28 20:43:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,511
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20972762
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Blake/pseuds/Blake
Summary: Five times Lana saved Marina from the wilderness and the one time she didn't.





	Like we're supposed to be

**Author's Note:**

> This is a very weird story but I like it that way. I'm releasing it into the wind like dandelion wishes. I can't believe I'm getting to see Marina and Lana in the same week. May you all be so blessed. Especially the tumblr anon who asked when I would post a new story to ao3.

The oranges start falling onto Marina’s lawn and she’s not sure what to do with them. The roots and trunk of the orange tree are on her neighbor’s property, and she assumes her neighbor is the one taking care of the tree, so it seems like all its fruit should belong to her neighbor. But her neighbor isn’t collecting the oranges and is instead leaving them to rot on Marina’s lawn, the stench of the overripe juice making her mouth water every time she passes the driveway.

On restless days when she can’t write and just stares out her front window, she imagines gathering all the oranges in a basket and returning them to her neighbor’s doorstep. She never manages to do it, because she doesn’t have a basket. She doesn’t even have a cooking pan big enough to contain more than two of those fat oranges, the single biggest fruit Marina has seen in real life. She moved to the Los Angeles suburbs from Wales only two weeks ago, and large containers somehow never make it onto her constant, daily shopping lists of necessities she never realized were necessities until she was suddenly five thousand miles away from her cotton swabs and toilet bowl cleaner.

“Such a waste,” she declares mournfully one day over tea, staring out her uncurtained window—she needs to add curtains to her shopping list—at the black spots on the oranges where they’re bursting at the seams and spilling juice all across the overgrown grass. Marina grew up eating pale, imported oranges so dry you had to suck hard just to taste the drops of their flavor. She could not have paid pure gold to get such fruit in Wales, so to have it wasting away on her own lawn feels criminal, like laughing at the gods, like watching pound notes—_dollar bills_scatter away on the wind.

The oranges are making her anxious. Being anxious isn’t much better than being depressed, which is the condition she was trying to get _away_from by moving to sunny Los Angeles. Bad lungs and depression have been replaced by dry sinuses and anxiety about wasted oranges.

Marina decides to take a walk, like she always does. It will make her sinuses even drier and the oranges will still be there when she returns, but at least she can rest her mind for an hour or two. Back home, she used to breathe in wet, moldy air and walk across the dark, bleak pastures or the black shoreline just to end up back where she started. In LA, the theory is that she can at least rest her lungs and her mind enough that she can functionally complete her work writing assignments.

_Sunscreen_, she texts to herself before leaving, to add to her shopping list later. She shrugs a light jacket over her pink, burnt arms and steps out into the world.

By the time she makes her way back to her cul de sac, the sun is low in the sky, but in a warm, golden way, instead of the cold, silver way she associates with winter sundown in Wales. She squints into the heat of the sun, surrounded by the light caress of cool, dry air, and calculates, for the first time, that her house must face the East.

She’s exhausted from hiking up and down these monstrous LA hills, but her heartrate still manages to speed up as she approaches her neighbor’s driveway and hears the sounds of someone moving. Maybe this will be her chance to broach the subject of Lana’s oranges. She feels deeply guilty about the waste of oranges, so the potential alleviation of that guilt makes her break out in a new, cold sweat—or maybe that’s the prospect of justice being served when she forces Lana to take responsibility for her fallen oranges.

Marina comes to a stop at the ridge of Lana’s short driveway and observes that her neighbor is lost in some kind of work on the sturdy table that perpetually sits outside her garage. Marina is terribly unpracticed at navigating these kinds of American suburban encounters. Her interactions with her other neighbors have been riddled with sinister passive aggression and ominous hinting at other neighbors’ character flaws and misdemeanors. It’s been two weeks and she has already been made to feel like a shit person for renting a house with a lawn instead of a water-wise, drought-friendly, pollinator-friendly garden, and has also been told, by the middle-aged man across the street and the mother of two at the end of the cul de sac, about Lana’s abusive, significantly older ex-boyfriend.

Marina is so bad at suburban life that she can’t remember the names of the middle-aged man across the street and the mother of two at the end of the cul de sac. She only remembers Lana’s name because Lana left a note with the pie that she deposited at Marina’s doorstep on her second day. It was an apple pie, homemade and more mythically, relentlessly American than Marina really believed to be possible. She only ate some of it out of desperation until she did some real food shopping, and then she threw the rest in the rubbish, wondering how severe a suburban crime she was committing.

Not wanting to commit another crime by interrupting her neighbor’s work, Marina stands there, waiting for a convenient pause or else to be noticed. A thick cascade of long, soft-brown hair shields Lana’s face, as well as whatever it is that she’s working on with her hands. The blue jeans she’s wearing look oversized and worn thin, making Marina wonder if they’re boyfriend-style jeans or actual boyfriend-jeans, left behind before the restraining order.

When Lana turns around, Marina is half-expecting her face to be smudged in tear-streaked mascara. Instead, her features are as bland and forgettable as they are every time, which is probably why Marina keeps superimposing more dramatic images over her memory of Lana’s gentle snub-nose, tired eyes, round cheeks, and softly curved mouth.

“Oh, there you are,” Lana calls out to her, gesturing with hands caked in a thick, sticky substance almost as pale as her face.

“Here I am!” Marina injects her voice with cheerful energy, only realizing that she’s just imitated Julie Andrews from _The Sound of Music_, which she hasn’t watched in over a decade but still has memorized. She wonders what it means, in suburban code, that Lana seems to have been expecting her, or at least wondering where she’s been. They’ve only talked a handful of times before this, and her stomach immediately fills with cement-heavy dread at the idea that she could already bear the responsibility of _belonging_in someone else’s world, of being expected to orbit in a predictable way so that some neighbor can anticipate her activities. She moved to LA to escape the claustrophobia of her hometown, and she avoided the city proper in order to avoid constant interactions with people. She thought having the bare mountainside behind her would provide her with the calm of deep, unobstructed breaths. When Lana curls one of her caked fingers in with a subtle smile, beckoning her closer, Marina does not feel like she can breathe.

She makes her way carefully down the steep slope of the driveway, watching her own Vans traversing the carpet of dead pine needles and oak leaves instead of maintaining eye contact. “I, er, was hoping you’d be out,” Marina says, trying to tell the truth without telling any lies, which is a strangely challenging game that she likes to play sometimes.

“To ask about the oranges?”

Marina slips on some foliage in her haste to look up for some sort of explanation for how Lana has read her mind. Her neighbor, however, has already turned back to her work, the curtain of hair hiding all her secrets.

“Er, yeah,” Marina agrees, getting close enough to see that Lana’s hands are working in a gray slab of clay.

“She likes you,” Lana says. Her voice sounds so dreamy and faraway that it takes Marina a minute to realize that the quality of her voice isn’t the only reason that she can’t understand this statement.

“Who likes me?” Marina fights the instinct to look behind her in paranoia, but she feels watched, even with Lana’s head bent over her work.

“My orange tree.” Lana tosses her head, throwing some hair back to smile at Marina, who watches in fascination as the tips of Lana’s hair drift through her artwork, picking up tiny clumps of white. Lana keeps looking at her, head tilted. It’s such a long, quiet look, that she must be looking for something, or seeing something.

Marina gives in, meeting her eyes, which are some indefinable non-color, like clear water in which a dirty paintbrush has been dipped, like the atmosphere tinted by the brown-gray-hazel of the Los Angeles smog.

Lana’s smile breaks into a grin, her straight American teeth a shock of lightning-white that makes Marina’s heart skip a beat as she waits for some kind of thunder. “She’s giving you all her bounty,” Lana says, still hardly making any sense. “Have you tried one?”

“One what?”

“An orange.”

“Oh! No,” Marina insists, eager to make it clear that she committed no such suburban crime outside of her imagination. Her eyes drift down to Lana’s collarbones, which stick out from the loose v-neck of her large t-shirt, and lower, idly gauging her cup-size in the comparative way that all women do. She stops when she realizes that Lana is not wearing a bra, her C-cups loose in her shirt, the shape of her nipples visible through the thin cotton.

When she looks up at Lana, she’s still grinning even though she is focused once again on her clay. “You should. They’re very sweet.”

“I wasn’t sure if you wanted them back, since they’re from your tree.” It might be a non-sequitur, but Marina is too disoriented in this conversation to process the things Lana says at the rate that she is saying them.

“You can bring me over a glass of fresh-squeezed juice some day.” There’s a chime of laughter in the odd proposition, or compromise, or whatever it is. She cranes her neck to look behind her at the tree in question. Marina follows her gaze and notes, for the first time, that there are hardly any oranges on this side of the tree. “Oh look,” Lana whispers, even though Marina is already looking. “_She_likes you, too.”

She might actually be crazy, or a witch, Marina thinks. Suburban conversation can’t always be this eerie and hard-to-follow. “The tree?” she asks, trying to follow.

“No, the deer.”

Marina only sees the deer once it’s been named, a statue-still smudge of gray amongst the trees between their two houses. “Oh my god,” she murmurs, riding the line between fear and awe at the creature that seems as tall as her, standing ten feet away. She doesn’t realize she’s backing away from it until her spine bumps into the worktable and Lana’s palm lays against her shoulder blade, gently guiding her away from the sharp edge. “She’s so… big,” Marina says lamely, wondering how on earth she makes a living writing words.

“Yeah?” Lana sounds surprised, as though she’s used to seeing giant animals up close. Her hand glides smoothly across the top of Marina’s back, a steady pendulum swing, pulling hairs every so often. The deer never blinks, staring into Marina’s eyes like they’ve hypnotized one another.

Finally, the deer bends its delicate head to the earth and eats something before walking silently down the property line and into Marina’s backyard. Marina wonders how often the deer visits her backyard and realizes, with sudden and fierce guilt, that she hasn’t spent enough time in it to notice whether giant deer are there or not.

“It’s an honor to share space with a prey animal.” Lana’s voice is back to its normal, ethereal volume. Her hand stops stroking Marina’s shoulders and grazes down the center of her spine before disappearing altogether, the last stroke of a cross-shaped blessing. “We startle each other so easily.”

Marina watches Lana working with her clay again while a dozen questions tumble around fruitlessly in her head. _How are you so peaceful_, is one of them, because it just seems improbable and unfair that someone with such a dark past should have such a lovely and serene presence, while Marina had to move to the fucking desert just to try to escape her the fetid swamp of her own mind.

The strangest part about the whole encounter is that Marina walks back to her house with a smile on her face, feeling comforted rather than unsettled. She goes out after dark to pick an orange off the ground and brings it back inside to open. The peel comes away almost too easily and the segments unpredictably cling together in some places and break apart in others, a chaos of overripe flesh sending juice dripping her wrists, bringing into relief scars she hasn’t thought about in years.

The orange is so full of sweet and sour that it brings tears to her eyes. It’s the most delicious fruit she has ever tasted.

~~~

She starts running into Lana more often after that. They have similar schedules and both work from home, which means that they see each other so often that Marina wonders if it had been happening the whole time, without her noticing, just like she didn’t notice the deer who practically lives in her backyard until it was pointed out to her.

On the day that Marina decides to start tackling the field of weeds that have taken over what the landlord told her was once a garden in the backyard, Lana is sunbathing.

Marina takes two steps out into the yard when she sees her and stops short. Lana’s pale body looks too large and soft for the angular bikini she’s wearing, as though the garment is a relic from a very different time.

Trying to retreat before being spotted, Marina takes a silent step backward, twisting the gardening gloves she’s just bought in her two hands with all the frustrated longing of a repressed Victorian lady, like the field of weeds is a lover she’s too embarrassed to be seen with in public.

To her dismay, Lana must hear her attempt at a hasty departure. She lifts her sun-rosy head off of the towel she’s lying on and twists to look at Marina under the visor of a flattened hand. “It’s a beautiful day for gardening,” she calls out, soft and encouraging.

Marina stares for too long a moment at the gentle fold across the center of Lana’s slightly padded stomach and the fainter one a bit lower. Marina has spent most of her life sucking in her stomach whenever anyone even _might_be looking, and the times she remembers noticing that she was _not_trying to flatten her stomach were memorable because they indicated how little she cared about living in any way. Now here Lana is, breathing big through her belly in a too-small bathing suit and looking impossibly, absolutely flawless. Something dark in Marina’s chest singes and crumbles to dust and floats away on her next exhale, the most minor of exorcisms.

Lana’s smile collapsing into a bright grin like a supernova is what makes Marina realize she’s been silently staring for over a minute. And_still_Lana hasn’t fidgeted in self-consciousness or made any move to cover herself.

Marina clears her throat. “I mostly just want to clear a path to the table,” she explains, forging ahead through the knee-high grass. There’s a filthy, cobwebbed patio table in the center of the yard that she’s been dreaming of writing on.

“I have total faith in you,” Lana chants as she lies flat once again to smile at the sun.

With her brand new, too-big gloves, Marina starts to pull out clumps of grass. As she bends down, she catches herself sucking in her stomach in case Lana is looking, and she tries to force herself to stop. The ground is dry and hard, unlike anything she ever touched in Wales. It clutches tight as a corpse’s dry fist around the roots of the grass. The stems keep breaking off in her cramping hands.

“Is it okay if I take your picture?”

It should feel like a threat. There’s a river of sweat under her tits and probably all across her face and back. Her cheeks are probably flushed bright red, and she knows there are black curls breaking free at her sorry attempt at a ponytail. Her band shirt is so big that it’s probably impossible to tell that she’s wearing shorts underneath, and her socks don’t match. But for some reason, she feels like if Lana took her picture, the photograph would come out cuter than Marina could ever hope to find herself in real life. Lana’s question doesn’t feel like a threat; it feels like a promise.

Marina lifts her eyes off the ground to see Lana looking at her with an expression that could only be described as neutral. “Sure,” Marina agrees, shaking her head and turning back to the weeds, since she thinks that’s the pose Lana wants to capture.

She’s expecting Lana to use her phone to take the picture, but a minute later, Lana is coming back from a trip into her house, a big digital camera in her hands. It’s only now, as Lana takes pictures through the chain-link fence, that Marina realizes she’s a professional photographer. All those times Lana mentioned _shoots_and_locations_and _events_—which Marina assumed were all acting or modeling gigs that Lana was mentioning in the attention-seeking way that most people in LA seem to do—she had actually been talking about photography jobs.

When she asks to see the pictures, Marina is strangely disappointed to find that in most of them, she’s an out-of-focus blur of white behind a stark net of chain-link diamonds.

While she’s leaning close with her gloved hands threaded through the chain-link like a girlhood friend with a secret handshake, trying to see what Lana saw in her photographs, a rustle of motion in her peripheral vision startles her out of her skin. She shrieks. Lana’s fingers slide comfortingly close across the back of her hand, giving her the strength to tell herself that she shouldn’t always assume the worst. It’s probably a squirrel or a lizard or something.

As soon as her heart has quieted down, the animal _slithers_again and Marina sees the distinctly slick movement of a shiny-scaled _snake_in the grass.

“Holy shit-fuck, god-jesus fuck,” Marina screams, clawing her way up the fence with her vans wedged clumsily into the gaps.

“What is it, a snake?” Lana asks mildly. She does not sound terrified for her life. Marina is too scared to look away from the last place she saw the snake, in case she misses it coming back out to hunt her down. She manages to nod.

“Oh, poor babe,” Lana hums. Her fingers are soothing across Marina’s knuckles, but just as Marina is about to laugh at herself and relax, Lana asks, “Was it a rattlesnake?”

Marina hates this question and each of its several implications. She doesn’t know whether to object to the idea that she should _only_panic about seeing snakes if they’re poisonous, or whether to cry about the fact that there might be _poisonous snakes_living in her yard that nobody warned her about, so she exasperatedly sputters, “_I don’t know_!”

“Oh, babe.” Lana’s incantations work as fast as shots of vodka, loosening the adrenaline-tight grip of Marina’s muscles. “I’m sure it wasn’t. We would have heard it. If you ever do come across one though, just turn around and go back the way you came from.”

Marina looks out across the yard, ninety percent of which is still knee-high and hiding god knows how many deadly snakes. Even as soothed as she is, she’s in utter despair about ever getting the patio table cleared. She’s not sure she can ever set foot back here again. She might even have to climb over the fence into Lana’s yard just to make her way home without stepping on the contaminated land.

With that uncanny ability to read Marina’s mind, Lana promises, “Next time, I’ll come out with you and help you clear the weeds. But look, you did a lot today. You got so much done. You can give it a rest, for now. We’ll work on it another day.”

After several minutes of silence from the grass behind her and Lana’s steady voice before her, Marina feels brave enough to look away from the snake’s last position. As soon as she looks down into Lana’s eyes from high above, where she’s crawled up the fence, they both break into laughter. Marina laughs until her chest feels emptied of everything that ever clogged it. She laughs like a dusty room that’s just had its windows flung open to the cleansing sun and the clarifying breeze.

Lana releases her hand just to take another photo. Marina makes faces at the camera lens and pushes all the ridiculous curves of her body into the wire of the fence, distorting her skin and laughing in relief at the way Lana keeps giggling at her so warmly.

In these photos, Marina is in focus, no longer a blurry mess. Lana shows them to her while they sunbathe together on her towel, in her yard, surrounded by her wild-looking lavender and sage bushes and her sweet-smelling jasmine vines.

~~~

Lana comes over a few days later to help with the garden, because Marina asks her to. There are no snakes, but there’s this one patch of vegetation that’s making her feel defeated, like she should have just found a way to pay for a gardener like everybody else on her block without drowning in guilt for underpaying for manual labor.

It’s dry, and brittle. It reminds her of fern, but ferns in Wales are wet and green and _wet_and nestled and coiled into the black earth like creatures seeking warmth. This stuff reaches out from the rocks and brown sand like something desperate, like something that’s found its strength in desperation. Each handful Marina grabs breaks off in her hands, not giving an inch, not even bending enough to give her a single hint about where the root of the plant even is.

“You have to be gentle,” Lana scolds her, with a laugh that’s indistinguishable from the tickle of the noonday sun.

“I _am_being fucking gentle,” Marina complains. She’s always had a defensive streak, and her patience has been ruined by the prickling hairs of this godforsaken plant that’s stinging her through her gloves.

Lana doesn’t have any gloves, so her hands are planted on her wide hips—she’s wearing those boyfriend-jeans again.

Marina grabs another handful of fern to demonstrate how frustrating the stuff is, making an exasperated sound as she does it.

“No, like, wrap your hands around it,” Lana prompts, so Marina does, ready to break another handful of empty, brown-green branches off. But Lana stops her. “And _don’t_pull it. Don’t pull,” she warns, laughter in her voice, as though she can see all the micro-movements of Marina’s intent. Marina doesn’t pull.

“Just kind of… Keep your hands loose around it. Yeah, okay,” Lana continues, sounding almost breathless, like she’s talking somebody down from a ledge. Marina tries as hard as she can to keep her grip loose, even though it’s so unsatisfying. “And then, like, go from your core.” Suddenly, there’s a hand on Marina’s back, somewhere over her kidneys, probably, coaxing her back from her very centre. “Pull from your core, just lean back.”

Leaning back means leaning into Lana’s palm, and Marina does. The fern actually comes with her, instead of breaking to pieces between her fingers.

“Oh my god,” Marina says, bizarrely moved, despite having accomplished absolutely nothing, besides moving some branches a few inches from where they were before. A trickle of sweat slides down her temple and she wonders how quickly heat stroke can make someone lose their sanity.

The hand on her back slide up and down, mild, encouraging, dragging her cotton t-shirt through the sticky sweat across her spine. 

“Now see where it’s moving from? See its centre of gravity?” Lana asks, sounding closer than before in Marina’s heat-clogged ears. “Get closer to it.”

Without fully understanding the meaning of the words, Marina acts on them, lunging deeper to wrap her _gentle_grip lower on the brittle stalks, closer to where they seemed to be originating from. The pressure on her back disappears, and then suddenly, Lana’s whole body is pressed against her, two breasts against her scapulae, two shoulders hugged around her own, two sets of fingers wrapped around her wrists.

Together, they lean back until the plant starts to drag its own root from the earth, baring its ugly, gnarled, base origin, crooked and hairy and clinging to something still deep within the earth, even as it breathes in the sun.

Marina gasps.

“That’s it.” Lana’s voice is as light and heated as the air in Marina’s lungs. After another moment of sustained tension, a piece of the root breaks away from the rest of its underground network, and Marina falls back, sending Lana fighting for footholds behind her as they both laugh and breathe. Marina stares at the huge tangle of detached branches in her hands, at Lana’s hands on her wrists. She sees, now, how the plant is spread across this half of the yard through a whole circulation system of veins and arteries underground, connecting one plant. She pulls away from Lana to reach for the piece of the root network that’s still exposed from the dirt, pulled up unwillingly by the piece of root they’ve just pulled free.

“There’s a whole world under there,” Lana says, “If you’re gentle enough to get it to come out on its own.”

Gritting her teeth, Marina looks behind to her to see Lana looking with closed eyes at the sun.

~~~

It sounds like a horde of demons screaming. Guttural howls and ear-piercing shrieks, so loud and close, suddenly erupting in the otherwise silent stillness of the night. Marina is standing at the sink, the water still running over the plate she’d been cleaning. Sweating, she suppresses her instinct to run and hide under the bed. Maybe it’s a satanic cult ritual, or someone murdering twelve dogs at once, or teenagers. None of those things would are likely to come into her house and try to kill her, she thinks.

Then there’s a knock on her front door.

The water keeps running and her heart keeps racing until a voice filters through the door. “Hey, uh, hi, it’s me, Lana.”

According to Lana, the sound is coming from coyotes, which are an animal that Marina had never had any reason to imagine before. She thinks they’re a kind of dog, or cat, or hyena. Whatever they look like, she hates them.

Marina’s eyes go dry looking at this woman who’s observant and thoughtful enough not only to imagine that Marina had never heard coyotes screaming before, but to come over and reassure her that it wasn’t actually demons climbing out from the bowels of hell to murder her. Her smile is something pretentious people call _enigmatic,_and her form is lost under a billowing, gauzy white dress. Marina kind of loves her.

The screaming stops as soon as Lana sits down on the leather couch. Still, she agrees to stay until Marina’s heartrate returns to normal and it’s clear that the coyotes won’t be coming back. They put on some shitty American drama series for distraction. Lana keeps reaching over to check her heartrate. It’s a careful, pressed tuck of her cupped fingers under the heft of Marina’s breast, over the ribs so rarely touched by anything, a balm against the aching muscles between them. It makes Marina’s heartrate spike in surprise each time, making Lana retreat again with that _enigmatic_smile.

To slow down her heart, and because the colour will match the red of Lana’s lips, Marina opens a bottle of cabernet sauvignon.

It must match Marina’s lips too, because two-thirds of a bottle in, Lana keeps looking at them. She won’t stop. Marina giggles, buzzed enough not to know what anything mean. Not anything in the world.

The coyotes start shrieking again, and she laughs, while Lana looks at her.

Her heartrate stops, full-on flatlines, when Lana kisses her on the mouth, so wet and so soft, so _big_.

Her mind is a blank, white slate for a forever-moment. When she finds her way out of it, she’s on her feet, sprung to the other side of the living room with her hands over her face, feeling where it happened, shocked and mostly blind.

“Oh god, I’m so sorry,” Lana is hissing, rough enough to be tears. But she still looks sweet and unreadable as stone, standing and backing up with a small knit in her brow. “I thought—I thought you—I’m sorry.” Lana’s hands settle across her own stomach, clutching in the impossible folds of her flowing white dress.’’

Marina still has no idea what really happened, or why. Lana _thought_… she thought what? That she could get away with _kissing_her? That Marina _wanted_to be kissed? That the invitation to sit on her couch meant something else? She’s so fucking confused. The coyotes are still howling. Her thoughts take so long to settle that Lana makes her way to the door in the silence.

“I can still stay, if you want,” Lana says quietly, gesturing by swinging the open door vaguely in the direction of the coyotes’ horrific sounds. “I promise I won’t…” A strand of her hair drops into her face like choreography to not-finish her sentence.

“Of course. Erm. Please,” Marina stutters, finally regaining her awkwardness. Awkwardness is more natural to her than silence. She sits on the couch, trying to arrange her limbs however it was that she used to arrange her limbs before it occurred to her that she could be sending the wrong signals to her neighbor. She spews out some wretched sentence about needing to find out what happens to the insufferable protagonist of the show that’s still streaming on her laptop, unperturbed by the events in the living room. She thinks she successfully smiles. She thinks Lana might look too closely while she does it. She just wants to go back to not thinking anything of the way Lana looks at her mouth.

So they watch the rest of the episode and the next, sitting stiff and awkward until the second bottle of cabernet. The coyotes must go to sleep.

Marina leaves for a moment to change into some pyjama shorts. When she sits down on the couch this time, she’s terribly aware of arranging her disproportionately muscular bare legs, conscious of placing them in a flattering way, her mind spiraling in a wine-stained mess of confusion of the way she arranges her body around men she’s flirting with and the way she arranges her body around women she’s trying to impress with her superiority. Regardless, Lana appears to stare fixedly on the screen, her unblinking eyes shiny in the blue light.

“I heard you had a boyfriend,” Marina blurts out, after a few silent moments of obsessing over the idea that neighborhood gossip had filled her with a false sense of security about her apparently lesbian neighbor.

Lana blinks, then. She looks delicate enough to care for. Her face is as carefully arranged as Marina’s legs. Marina can imagine touching it, to soften it with the heat of her palms, like cold-hardened clay. She takes a sip of wine instead.

“I did.”

Marina stares, trying to figure out her expression. It’s not defensive, or avoidant. Not sad. Regretful, maybe. Empty. _I did_. It’s so past tense, so final, so ominous. Or is it just matter-of-fact?

Marina shrugs, allowing her eyes to close, fatigue suddenly hitting her. She supposes bisexuality exists, after all. She has always figured herself to be bisexual in theory—if women weren’t so fucking annoying, or if she was actually physically attracted to them.

It’s weird, though, because she doesn’t really find Lana annoying at all, not even though she crossed such a boundary and _kissed_her. But attraction? _Attraction_?

Marina softens like so much clay when Lana reaches out to touch her ribcage, more careful than ever, palm flat and cool. “Back to normal,” Lana declares. Her smile is enigmatic. She gets up and prepares to leave. Marina suddenly feels horribly guilty for keeping her for so long, so unexpectedly stealing her away from her night all because of some screaming dogs.

“Sorry,” Marina says to Lana at the door, instead of goodbye.

Lana turns to leave in a hurry, her face lost to darkness. “No, _I’m_sorry. See you…” comes the warm, airy voice from the night.

~~~

It becomes a thing, Lana coming over to watch crap on Netflix to distract Marina from various things: coyotes, the vertigo of earthquakes, the bone-deep roar of helicopters, the visceral, instinctual alarm of the charred smell of wildfire smoke, and homesickness.

In the daytime, Marina sits and works at her table in the garden during the few hours of the day that the umbrella actually manages to provide shade. She notices that she’s started using the word _enigmatic_in her articles and blog posts, and she hates herself for it, but she can never think of a fitting synonym.

On one of the hottest days in August, Marina knocks on Lana’s door and begs, “Take me out for a swim. Please. I can’t live like this.”

Lana emerges from behind a curtain of sweet-smelling smoke—not marijuana, not tobacco. Marina sniffs subtly, trying to place the smell without being rude about it. “I thought you’d never ask,” Lana murmurs as she retreats back into her dark, smoky house.

An hour later, they’re lying on fine, golden sand, surrounded by the screams of splashing children and a delicate, cool breeze. Marina can’t stop smiling. “This is brilliant,” she gasps, stepping ankle-deep into the cool water before it swells away from her and she sinks into the sucking grasp of wet sand. She hasn’t felt water so welcoming since visiting her father’s hometown in Greece when she was ten.

Lana holds her hand and swings it twice before setting her free, as if releasing a dove. Marina splashes forward into the salty white waves that crash at her feet, then her shins, then her thighs. Her muscles burn from the push and pull of the water as she presses on across a flat field of sand that seems to go on forever. When she finally goes far enough, the cold water breaks across her stomach and rips the breath from her lungs.

She floats, belly toward the sun, letting her hair get soggy and heavy and swim around her head, and she listens to the cries of seagulls and the roar of a huge wave crashing, and then the wave crashes down on her, and she struggles to right herself, laughing and gasping sea water.

Lana is there, silky wet arms around her and soft flesh against her spine. Marina knows it’s her before she even sees her, before she can push the salty, blinding strands of hair off her face and finally look down at Lana’s hands around in the skin of her bare stomach.

Marina spins around in Lana’s loose hold as the next wave breaks in the space between their bodies. There’s a tug at Marina’s feet, like a creature trying to pull her under. She holds fast to Lana’s upper arms, looking with wide eyes into her reflection in Lana’s mirrored sunglasses.

“Watch for the undertow,” Lana warns, sounding sweetly concerned.

Apparently even the golden, warm, soft-sanded beaches of California have their dangers.

They stand there for a long time, holding each other up as the waves crash against their waists and the undertow pulls hungrily at their feet. Marina thinks about how salty Lana’s kiss would be. In the warm swells of water and skin, she loses all sense of where her limbs end and where Lana’s begin.

~~~

That night, there’s a black widow on the chain-link fence. Marina is amazed by her own ability to look at it and watch with morbid curiosity as the spider simply exists. Full, black sphere of a body, a red mark on her belly like a cheap Halloween decoration. It takes five minutes of full concentration for Marina to relax all her muscles enough to sit and stare death in the face as she rests, patient and still, on her web.

It’s only after she’s relaxed that she notices the white roses blooming all over her fence, beside the spider. They’re Lana’s roses, but the blossoms are pushing through the diamonds in the fence, as though reaching for her.

In the blinding headrush as she stands, Marina almost believes in magic, or that nature reveals secrets, or something. She believes in love that reaches across fences against all odds, away from the sunlight to give shelter to death.

She lets herself into Lana’s house and finds her in the kitchen, crushing green olives with her bare hands.

Marina backs her up against the counter. She comes close, and closer, gradually, providing plenty of space for Lana to move away, even though her breath is so tight and she can’t let it out until she’s kissing Lana again.

Lana doesn’t move away, but she stands still, awkward and still, struggling to find a place for her hands, which are covered in flesh-like pieces of shredded olive. “I was making olive oil,” she whispers, and it sounds more like a code than an explanation.

“I saw a black widow,” Marina whispers, speaking a code she doesn’t consciously understand.

She stands on the tips of her toes until Lana’s eyelashes drop heavy and lovely to cover the green sparkle of her eyes. It’s a code and a dance Marina unconsciously understands, and has for who knows how long.

Lana kisses her deep and wet like smoke, reaching for her lungs, her heart. 

Desire unfurls in Marina’s ribcage like flowers blossoming and breaking through the slats to reach for the sunshine standing before her, branches heavy with fruit. An ocean erupts low in her stomach, an undertow swelling between her legs. She holds Lana’s jaw, careful now that she understands, like the kiss might snap in two, like Lana might startle and run away if she’s not gentle enough. A coyote howls outside, and Lana’s elbows dig into her sides, her hands still flexing in the air, untouched, until Marina reaches for them, twisting their fingers together and smiling into their kiss.


End file.
